United States

By Mikey

I am a 13-pound Shih Tzu with long silky black and white fur. I am very, very friendly and I enjoy people and like to make them happy. My pet person is married to a nationally known trainer. He and I have helped with view graphs, talks and books on how to manage volunteers, so we knew what to look for as we headed out to volunteer. I am the one writing about our experiences while sitting on my person's lap to protect both the guilty and the innocent. See what you think of the things that happened to us.

Getting Started, Sort Of

Our volunteer adventures began a few months after my pet person retired. My person and I decided that we would like to visit the elderly and sick, particularly Alzheimer's patients, so I could play with them and bring a little cheer into their day. At the same time my person decided to help out at a Science Education Center in the area. Since he is a Ph.D. scientist, he thought that his skills could be useful teaching science to children and the public. That has proven more frustrating than our experiences together, but more on that later.

Larger all-volunteer organizations frequently have one or more paid staff to support the work of the association's officers, at least at the regional or national level. The relationship between the association's president or chairperson and the top employee is critical to furthering the work to be done. But just as these leaders have grown accustomed to each other's styles, talents, and quirks, everything changes and a newly-elected board takes office.

How do organizations handle the transition period when the baton is being passed from one president to the next? From practical tips to poetic musing, this article tries to help.

Once in a while, a volunteer is injured, or injures someone else, in the course of his or her work. Sometimes, it is just an allegation that the volunteer injured someone else; whether or not the allegation is true, a legal defense still is required. In many cases, the cost of the incident is greater than the volunteer's own ability to pay, which is why insurance protection for volunteers should be part of every nonprofit organization's risk strategy. Even so, prevention is better than cure, and there is a lot you can do to prevent accidents from happening in the first place.

In this article, we will describe the circumstances involved in the claims we see in our Volunteers Insurance Service (VIS ® ) program, and offer guidance to help you minimize the chance that such claims might happen to your own volunteers.

Injuries caused by volunteers to themselves or to others tend to fall into a few common claims scenarios which we'll cover in this article by the three types of volunteer insurance coverage that respond:

• accident medical reimbursement
• personal liability
• excess automobile liability
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  • Read more about Volunteers' Most Common Accidents - and How to Avoid Them

The founding of the American Lung Association is intertwined with the work of many courageous volunteers who began by fighting the dreaded scourge of tuberculosis at the end of the 19th century. Read the stories of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, the first volunteer president of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis (and himself a victim of the disease), Emily Bissell who created the amazingly-successful Christmas Seal campaign, and other pioneering volunteers.

Ten Thousand Villages, the largest fair trade organization in North America, works to provide vital, fair income to artisans in Africa, Asia and Latin America by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories. The nonprofit organization has its American headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania and Canadian headquarters in New Hamburg, Ontario, and relies on a network of volunteers to keep operating costs low and to share its story with consumers. Tens of thousands of artisans benefit from the dedication and involvement of hundreds of volunteers across North America. Whether volunteers pull and pack orders in the warehouse or unpack merchandise and assist customers in a store, they know that their involvement changes artisans’ lives.

Interviewing is a lot like archery. The athletes who participate in that sport have their mind on one thing: hitting the bull’s-eye. Their strategy is to develop the skills to hit the bull’s-eye portion of the target every time. Your target when you interview is the kind of volunteer you want to place. And you need to develop the skills to hit that target as often as possible. Group interviewing, which is showcased in this article, will enable you to hit the bull’s-eye every time.

Traditionally, most volunteer interviews take place in a one-on-one situation between the candidate and a member of the volunteer program staff...The group interviewing process recommended here involves interviewing five volunteers simultaneously with two trained volunteer placement counselors conducting the interview. The philosophy of group interviewing, designing the group interview process, selecting and training volunteer placement counselors, the logistics of this system, and evaluation of interview efficacy are each be explored in this article.

An analysis of the volunteer service and community engagement efforts in eighteen selected Texas state agencies and commissions, with particular examination of their volunteer management practices.

In the late 1990s, the Volunteer Center of Battle Creek (Michigan) worked closely with the Points of Light Foundation (POLF) and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) to adopt and implement the POLF Family Matters program. The goal of the POLF Family Matters program was to “make family volunteering the norm in the U.S.” In support of this goal a goal that we share with the POLF we knew that implementation of a single program, no matter how well intended or implemented, would not be sufficient to move us to a community where family volunteerism was a norm. To reach this goal, we needed to develop the capacity of our own organization and the capacity of the organizations we serve, to work with a new kind of volunteerism family volunteerism.

This article reports on some of the strategic decisions we made to develop our capacity and that of participating organizations to work with family volunteers. A focal point of this article and our own learning was a study of family volunteers that explored the barriers and incentives to family volunteerism.

Tired of trying to get your group members motivated to help build membership? The General Federation of Women's Clubs knows that you have to make membership campaigns easy, rewarding and fun. We'll profile several of their membership-building strategies such as "Membership Round-Up" and you'll see how your group can try some of these great ideas to re-energize your members to recruit!